The nearest community to the proposed launch site in Sutherland is a crofting township of about 200 people.
Photograph: Courtesy of Perfect Circle PV

A remote area of land on the northern coast of Scotland is on track to become the UK’s first rocket spaceport after it was selected as the best place in the country from which to blast satellites into orbit.

The isolated county of Sutherland is one of the few spots in Britain where golden eagles and sea eagles still take to the skies, but from the early 2020s the birds may be sharing airspace with rockets bearing small satellites for communications and Earth observation.

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The area’s economic development agency, Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE), intends to build the launch site on Sutherland’s A’Mhoine peninsula, between Tongue and Durness, with an initial £2.5m grant from the UK Space Agency. As yet, there are no roads that lead to the chosen site.

Ministers hope that pressing ahead with commercial spaceports in Britain will help to bolster technical jobs and secure income from the rapidly growing market for satellite launches. The spaceport at Sutherland would launch micro-satellites into highly desirable polar and sun-synchronous orbits, the latter of which pass over the same spot at the same time each day.

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UK's first spaceport to be built on Scottish peninsula – video

On Monday, the UK Space Agency announced it had awarded £23m to the US aerospace group Lockheed Martin, which is expected to fly its Electron rocket from Sutherland. The agency handed a further £5 to Orbex, a British space company which is developing a rocket called Prime.

Cllr Linda Munro, who chairs the Sutherland county committee, said the nearest population to the proposed launch site was a crofting township of about 200 people at Talmine on the Kyle of Tongue. She said residents were divided about the scheme’s impacts and benefits.

“Some are very very pro, some people have real concerns,” she said. “On both sides, the feelings are very strong.”

Some were understandably worried about the noise, with many prizing their solitude, and fearing disruption to a settled way of life as well as the environmental and safety risks that come with rockets being launched into orbit.

After the announcement, the HIE said it had raised a total of £17.3m to develop the spaceport. HIE said it would put in nearly £10m, with the remainder coming from other sources. It said a final planning application was expected to be submitted in late 2019, with the scheme creating 40 jobs directly but supporting up to 400 jobs in the wider economy.

Munro said she supported the spaceport project, but cautioned that much hinged on how carefully HIE and Highlands council carried out their consultations with residents and how Lockheed Martin and others included locals in the job opportunities.

She said the phasing-out and decommissioning of Dounreay nuclear research reactor 35 miles to the east of the site had hit the local economy hard. “I think this is a tremendous boon for the area. This is an absolute wow for Sutherland and Caithness [the neighbouring county],” she said.

“I’m looking for real investment in jobs. I’m definitely looking for upskilling for people already living here. My greatest joy is what this will mean for our young people and children already growing up here, with an expectation of better jobs and better days.”

The Sutherland site was chosen over two other contenders in the HIE area, Unst in Shetland and North Uist in the Western Isles. Charlotte Wright, HIE’s chief executive, said the needs of the local population were uppermost in its planning.

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“We are also determined that this project will deliver strong community benefits, and our input at this early stage enables us to engage with local people to ensure the presence of the spaceport is a really positive development for this part of Sutherland,” she said.

Meanwhile, a “horizontal” spaceport is to be created at Cornwall airport near Newquay with the first satellites launched from the airport in the north of the county within three years. Unlike the vertical spaceport which will be built in Sutherland, horizontalones have long runways instead of launchpads to accommodate space planes, which take off like conventional aircraft.

Virgin Orbit, part of the Virgin Group, is aiming to launch satellites into space by using a modified 747-400. The Boeing will carry a rocket under its wing to a launch range over the Atlantic and release it at around 11,000m (35,000ft) for onward flight into space, carrying a satellite into Earth’s orbit.

Champions of the scheme said it would be able to conduct low-cost missions quickly and efficiently by bypassing established launch ranges. The Cornwall site will be the UK’s first horizontal spaceport.